Marc Olmsted, whose memoir, Don’t Hesitate: Knowing Allen Ginsberg, was published through Beatdom Books in 2014, will be reading at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco next Sunday. See the City Lights website for more...

By Kurt Kline In the poetry of Bob Kaufman, the poet is the healer, journeying down into the underworld of the American psyche in order to heal the wounds of racism, capitalist exploitation, and war. If Kaufman is, as many critics have suggested, a shaman, it is perhaps most properly in the tradition of Hoodoo, which employs music as a mode of otherworldly transport or to facilitate trance states. If Kaufman recuperates the...

The name Al Hinkle should be familiar to most readers of Beatdom, and if it isn’t then they’ll most likely know him by one of the names Jack Kerouac gave him in his novels: Big Ed Dunkel, Slim Buckle, or Ed Buckle. Hinkle and his wife, Helen were good friends of Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Neal Cassady, and feature frequently as characters in a number of Beat Generation texts, including many of Kerouac’s, and also John Clellon...

UPDATE: Competition now closed. On May 10th, at San Francisco’s Beat Museum, North Atlantic Books is hosting a special event to celebrate the release of the Collected Poems of Lenore Kandel. Beatdom is running a special competition on its Facebook page to giveaway a copy of this wonderful collection (hardcover, price $35). Head on over and “like” our latest status to be automatically entered for a chance to win! More...

Today would’ve been Jack Kerouac’s 90th birthday. Although he’s been dead a long time, his legacy is stronger than ever. Each year new readers stumble upon and find inspiration in his work. This year more people than ever will surely celebrate his birthday because of the new movie, On The Road. If you’re in San Francisco, you might want to pop along to the Beat Museum, where they’re holding a birthday...

There are few places around the globe that fully encompass all things Beat Generation in the same way as the City Lights Bookstore. Situated in the heart of San Francisco and owned by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, one of the most prolific Beat Generation poets there is, the City Lights Bookstore is a Mecca for all beatniks and book lovers. A visit to City Lights is enough to transport anyone back to simpler times where you can focus...

by Nick Meador At the turn of the 1960s, Jack Kerouac found himself in a profound state of limbo, the climax of an existential crisis that predated his life as a published author. He had been looking for an “answer” to his problems since his early twenties,[1] yet for a variety of reasons his dilemma remained unresolved. Then a 35-year-old Jack became famous in an instant when On the Road was published in the fall of 1957, and this...

On this day in 1925, Bob Kaufman was born. From Beatdom Issue One: Bob Kaufman: The Unsung Beat Overview It always baffles me to find Bob Kaufman omitted from a great many books and documentaries and websites and talk about the Beat Generation. For me, Kaufman is the embodiment of Beat. That is not to say that the more well known names and faces did not embody the spirit they are most widely credited with creating and fulfilling, but...